While I accept, support, participate in the notion that web content as we use/see it is evolving to something more than hand spun HTML static content (a good thing), but what the heck does defining a moving target get you?

Does it mean all of the Web 1.0 is obsolete, like showing up for your high school reunion driving a Yugo? I don't think attributes define things that cleanly- there are plenty of web content that is static, may have an ampersand in its URL (??), lacks RSS (it is great, but not everything needs it), etc that is still good, valid, interesting content.

Or let's not classify, rate, value content on basis of its technological characteristics, but its informational, experiential ones.

It has a strong odor of uber jargon, but should ever I start babbling in 48 point font about Web 2.0, someone please throw this entry in may face.

Now where are the keys to my Yugo?

So I use search most often while looking for specific things, but for discovery, it is really just the first layer of yielding primary sources. It is those secondary, tertiary, (quadriary?) exploration links that lead to the hidden gems.

So this morning, when I stumbled into something completely useful without it popping in a search result (and the fact I was not even looking for it initially), I am just compulsed to write it up at home before going into work, and will likely late for work.

So it started with an item that popped up in a few sites in my RSS reader. The April 2005 D-Lib article "Social Bookmarking Tools" by Hammond and others from the Nature Science group is an excellent read and a must bookmark-furl-spurl-delicious URL. Good beacuse it is thorough, intensely linked, illustrated, but also well written, and reads like it is written by someone who really is with it in terms of web technology:

Because, to paraphrase a pop music lyric from a certain rock and roll band of yesterday, "the Web is old, the Web is new, the Web is all, the Web is you", it seems like we might have to face up to some of these stark realities [n1]. With the introduction of new social software applications such as blogs, wikis, newsfeeds, social networks, and bookmarking tools (the subject of this paper), the claim that Shelley Powers makes in a Burningbird blog entry [1] seems apposite: "This is the user's web now, which means it's my web and I can make the rules." Reinvention is revolution – it brings us always back to beginnings.

We are here going to remind you of hyperlinks in all their glory, sell you on the idea of bookmarking hyperlinks, point you at other folks who are doing the same, and tell you why this is a good thing...

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web – utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things going on here: 1) server-side software aimed specifically at managing links with, crucially, a strong, social networking flavour, and 2) an unabashedly open and unstructured approach to tagging, or user classification, of those links.

So the article was a find in itself (and has been properly furled, actually before I read the whole thing).

It was towards the middle of the article under "Building Communities" where the authors begin to share the different ways tags and links dig into sources they have compiled in Connotea. The very first item in the list (this morning when I found it, this will change, right?) was listed as:

where the tag line was enough to hook me:

Freetag - an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications

Now I had back of my mind (way in the back, dusty seldom visited regions) been thinking that in a second generation version of our Maricopa Learning eXchange I could see a way to add tagging as a part of the MLX system (this is on the back burner until I can wrestle enough time to finish the first generation alpha of an open source MLX).

Note to self- it looks like Connotea is evolving nicely, must return for another cup of connotea...

But holy XXXXXXX! Freetag looks like it may just be able to plug in!

Freetag is an easy tagging and folksonomy-enabled plugin for use with MySQL-PHP applications. It allows you to create tags on existing database schemas, and access and manage your tags through a robust API.

This might mean I can incorporate some tagging into the MLX without having to toll code myself.

What is exciting to me, besides the value of the find, was the joy of the find. I would have likely gotten to this site from a web search, unless I did something like a specific search (which does work well, by the way). I found it by click luck.

This is what I tried to convey as the closing message in my TCC 2005 presentation yesterday... with the overload of information that we all feel, while traveling the confusing road to the future, how will you travel? With a sense of:

Despair
flickr image from http://flickr.com/photos/sabineschmidt/2507284/

or a wide eyed look of:

Wonder
flickr image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jon_pawley/8697122/

Finding by serendipity keeps me in the latter category.

PS Just the flickr search on "despair" brought a pile of serendipity-found images. See the lonliest hotdog or a dire situation. Follow the "your gone" set of images in order... Is there a mini meme of flickr storytelling? Hmmmm

The theme this 10th anniversary year is "Looking Back Toward the Future":

Since the 1970s, the impact of educational technology has been relentless and ever changing. What can we learn from our past? What's hot and what's not? Where are we going? What would we like to see? Through your experiences, we ask that you remind us, guide us, and help us navigate towards the future.

Join us on our 10th anniversary of the TCC Worldwide Online Conference to share your expertise, experiences and knowledge relevant to the use of information technology in learning, teaching and academic services. This event will also be useful for novices and those interested in Internet resources for teaching and learning. It will provide a strong foundation about what's currently happening in higher education.

This might be my 4th or 5th TCC conference, and it truly is a great experience as you get to interact as much as you can with a wide range of near and distant colleagues-- and since there are people presenting, chatting, posting around the world, there is something going on around the clock.

This is the third year our office has sponsored an institutional registration so that all faculty, staff, yes students, and even administrators can participate at no cost to them. We've been able to send more than 100 each year, which is not bad (unless you consider we have nearly 10,000 full-time and part-time eligible employees, not to mention another order of magnitude of students). The individual registration is reasonable (US$77, though it is late registration now so it is US$99), and this gives you access to all presentations and archives for the year. It's not too late to sign up!

Last year, I did a live audio session while attending an NMC meeting in San Francisco (via Elluminate), so picture me holding a laptop in a hotel hallway, aiming towards the wireless hub in our meeting room, looking from at a distance like a looney having an intense conversation with his screen... and then some other meeting emptied out in the hallway with lots of chattering noise.

So when asked by colleague Bert Kimura to do a keynote session this year, I rummaged around my big pile of remixed presentation ideas and graphics, and came up with this silly title/description:

"Harry Mudd, Small Pieces, and that Not Widely Distributed Future"
Predictions of the future are easily analyzed in hindsight and ought to be skeptically questioned-- you will have to tune into this session to see the connection with an old Star Trek episode. However, author William Gibson's insightful quote, "The future is here. It is just not widely distributed yet" is the framework I use to peek at the future. So for the use of technology in teaching and learning, where is this "not widely distributed future?" I am not sure, but in this session we will take some guesses at places you may find the future. The present use of the web was visible, but not widely distributed in 1992-- is something of that scale already here? Will text messaging displace email as a communication mode? We will look at the drivers of consumer used technologies that become disruptive (digital cameras take the lead of the consumer photo market, MP3 players re-shaping the music industry). How about those multitude of technology gadget web sites? The future is there and it is not. Are small pieces of technology "loosely" joined technologies (often open source) displacing large comprehensive commercial tools? Explore hands on some of the interesting "social" and connection technologies such as "tags", RSS, wikis, podcasts, and perhaps whatever else pops up between now and the conference.

With a week to go, that is all there is right now, as I am synthesizing things up to the wire. Since it is a live session presented in the Elluminate virtual classroom, I'll be uploading a series of slides into their whiteboard, and tossing out some audio over showing web sites and such. It is recorded and saved, though made available for registered participants (see, it is worth paying!), but I'll have some fragments of content posted eventually (once the ink dries).

This year there were actually two books:

one a non-fictional account and the other a fictionalized account of the "Honeymoon Couple" Glen and Bessie Hyde who attempted to raft the Colorado River in 1928 in a hand build wooden "scow". Brad Dimcock's Sunk Without a Sound, The Tragic Colorado River Honeymoon of Glen and Bessie Hyde is thoroglhy researched, photographed, and tells not only the story as the facts and accounts reveal, but also the author's own experience in recreating the attempt in 1996.

As a contrast, Lisa Michael's Grand Ambition is a novel version of what she envision happened to the couple during the trip paired with Glen's father's heroic efforts to try and search for them after they failed to check in as planned.

I had never read a fictionalized and non-fiction version of the same "story" so this was a fascinting experience. The authors met with a group of maybe 60 students, teachers, and communiyy members at Phoenix College, signed books, and answered questions in a discussion format.

You will have to read one o both yourself to find out what happened to the Hydes...

And of course a quickie search revealed that today is Vincent Van Gogh's birthday. Among other things you get by going sideways from a search is a short story called Van Gogh's Birthday Cake and the oddly-dressed logo at Candy Genius.

152 candles to you, Vince.

Trying to get the perl pieces in place for this plugin was a headache and a half. Tried to cpan the need GD.pm modules. First I was missing some sort of Test.pm modules.... oops, that was a missing piece of CPAN.pm that needed to be downloaded. GD needs the gdlib 2.0.8 or higher... and that was something I failed at via cpan and manually install. I did manage to install gdlib using fink via FinkCommander on this Xserve, but the hard part with that is that it places it in a directory that perl does not find by default. So than I tried adding the appropriate paths or "use" statements to get at GD.pm. I felt close, but perl thought otherwise as the plug in script kept bombing with detailed errors of "Premature end of Script headers".

While chatting/complaining with D'Arcy, he emphasized how easy the move from MT to WP was for him, setting my wheels into motion. The WP features look very robust, so I am going to give it a try sometime soon. It's time for a change. I don't have time for it, but it's time.

Single prickly pear pads stuck in the ground spread in a complex more than 4 feet wide and 3 feet high... other cactus of unknown identification spreads itself laterally where ever its sections fall and hit the ground. Small cute flowering cassia mushroom to debris shedding monsters. Anyhow, Saturday was clearing out a bunch of this as well as cutting down 3 palm trees 4-12 feet high, pulling out overgrown shrubs, a sort of landscape feng shui. Cutting the palm trees is interesting- a new chain on the chain saw slices nicely, but all the fibrous materials continually clog it. But boy, there is nothing like the feeling of power in your hands when that thing rrrrrrrips... Anyhow, by mid-day, we had the bed of the pick-up piled well above the cab, so it was off to the dump.

I'd never been to a landfill until maybe 3 years ago, and it is an experience I recommend for anyone who lives ion modern society, kids too. Otherwise, we tend to think that once tossed in the garbage, hauled off by strangers, this by product of our culture disappears. But hauling it your self to the landfill clearly illustrates that there is an impact of all this, and there is a whole complex process for moving the dump off points, covering with dirt, bull dozing, manitoring, etc. The amount of "stuff" we all generate is rather shameful... and to even just see it, smell it, see the ravens poking around, is well, frankly illustrative.

There is some sort of technology metaphor here, but I am too tired to concoct it. Meanwhile, the 20 ton pile of sand is down to about 11 or 12, and maybe in a few days we can claim back our parking spot.

So take an opportunity and see where your crap goes. Who's land is it on? Who lives near it? Who works there? Do we all have a part in the big piles?

Landscaping in arid Arizona should not involve grass (though many people try to replicate Midwest/ East Coast greens here). In the 7 years we have owned our house, we have had two deliveries of crushed granite and one of rounded "river rock" gravel that has been moved by wheel barrow front and back. Where has it gone? This latest effort is meant to provide a more level look to the back-- because of poor drainage we could not extend much of our cement deck, so we needed a more porous surface.

So since the big pink pile was dumped Tuesday, my wife and I have spent 2 hours the last 2 nights shoveling and hauling sand. Our neighbor across the street mentioned something about "why break your backs? Just hire some guys at $10 an hour to haul it." The remark has stuck with me-- it's not that we cannot afford to hire help, but we have this silly pride in doing work ourselves. Is that like some old Puritan work ethic? We enjoy the physical exertion, especially after a full day of desk jobs.

This has no direct relevance to anything blogged here, but then again, there is something to the "do it hands on" approach rather than taking the easy way out and just paying someone to do the work, be it tons of sand or technology.

Or not.... ask my back in a few days.

Our self-imposed sentence is 2 days of back busting labor.

Actually we enjoy the hard work, and it is a great mental break from the office chair. Get outside, get dirty, and build something with your own hands. Priceless.

The delayed gratification is heading up to our cabin for the next 4 days.

Readers may note that a few weeks back I was dealing with some strange web server activity every Saturday morning that managed to take out my XServe that runs this blog, Feed2JS, and our eportfolio service. The man from Apple said, "Stick a Fork in It", so 2 days before leaving town for a conference, I was re-installing a new OS volume (all the data resided separately).

Everything was up and running except for the pesky perl modules (DBI and DBD) that MovableType needs to use mySQL database. I tried:

* command line cpan (failed)
* fink /fink commanded (installed but not in directories available to MT)
* The Mac OS X installer for DBD::mysql (and Bundle::DB) downloaded from http://www.heavyhosting.net/AppToolkit/index.html?main=downloads.html except that the page/site is gone. I think I used it last time I built the server
* cpan again and again
* I bugged D'Arcy and Derek a few time

Nothing seemes to work.

But something happened once I left town, as all of a sudden the server was coasting along as it should be.

Except today when I downloaded and installed a security update. On restart, I got the suite of perl error messages about not being able to find DBI.pm and MovableType was hung.

It turned out to be simple-- digging down to where cpan stored all of the install files for DBI. A run through the README led to a series of command line scripts to run to create the DBI library. It was EASY, and it worked.

I am the perl god king (for maybe 4 minutes).

In the morning we met with Ben Brophy who is working on the user interface and design guides for the Sakai project, the open source course management system being developed by Indiana, Michigan, Stanford, and a bunch of other heavyweight universities. You cannot tell a whole lot about a system in a quick demo, but I can vouch it exists, that many great minds and hands are working on it. The gradebook is just being worked on, but we saw a bit of course content, the discussion boards, the "MyWorkspace" portal like view. There is much to be done interface-wide (IMHO) as it feels very much a document and list hierarchy so no more or less different from current CMS-es.

MIT is doing this in pilot phase, as they have Stellar, their home grown CMS that has been around long enough to build a good sized user base. They are not jumping in as quickly as what we hear about Michigan and Indiana, where they have done the full leap into Sakai for current students.

I do wonder if these enterprise systems are an incremental change from what we have now; yes I full understand the potential for add-ins once Sakai is ready for prime time, but for institutions like ours that lack the horsepower to do the integration/conversion of atop university, if the gains will be seen as worth the leap of change.

Next we visited with Kurt Fendt and sat in on a discussion with his students in the Comparative Media Studies Group. They have an interesting media management system called MetaMedia which is a web database of images, documents, videos, sounds files etc mostly for content in the Humanities.

Based on open standards, the Metamedia framework allows the formation of learner communities across disciplines and distances and ensures interoperability with a wide range of current and future media resources.

In MetaMedia, users can create their own "collections" by selecting from icons in subject "archives", thus building personal collections of media. From here, people can add comments and build discussions with others around the digital artifacts, and these are then tools of reflection used to support a wide range of Humanities research projects.

People can also upload their own media, with manually entered meta data via a web form. It has a bit of an eportfolio and a "rip mix" feel, I asked about the potential of folksonomy like tags for informal connections.

Next it was a dash over to the Media Lab where we met with some folks involved in projects in the Human Dynamics Group . After a quick overview of some of the projects, we sat in for a bit of a "class" which has not your sterotypical sitting in rows inside a box of a room. We were more in a lounge/studio part of the building, sitting on soft couches, listening to one of the group members sharing the results of his research project. And it was not a lecture, as it became a forum of interaction, as people freely tossed out ideas, comments, suggestions.

This project was in the Reality Mining Project and was fascinating! In vague detail, it involved providing students a cell phone that had been re-programmed to send information about its location and activities back to a central server, so there was continual data gathering of physical location, and algorithms applied to make good guesses about what sorts of activities the cell phone owner was doing. But it also used Bluetooth to find out what other enabled users were in proximity, so there is a whole layer of social dynamics and group interaction that can be extrapolated from the data.

The Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest academic mobile phone projects in the US. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations.

We are currently capturing communication, proximity, location, and activity data from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of this academic year. Such rich data about complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields. It is our hope that this research will help us explore research questions including:

* How do incoming students' social networks evolve over time?

* How entropic (predictable) are most people's lives?

* Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data?

* How can we change a group's interactions to promote better functioning?

It was mind-blowing, and we hated to leave, but we were shuttled off to another session where the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature faculty were being given an overview of electronic portfolios. The interesting thing here is that it is a relatively unknown concept here, so they are at the place of trying to figure out what kind of eport they need (assessment, showcase, etc) and looking at what others are doing. The discussions seemed a bit tilted toward the assessment type portfolio (I did toss out the question for them to think who the eport is for- the student or the institution, or both). We shared some of our Ocotillo work in eportfolios as well as the things we got from our recent eportfolio dialogue day. It is very odd to think that we are a bit ahead of MIT ;-) The do have an installation of the Open Source Portfolio system.

The last stop was in the Lego Learning Lab in the lower part of the Media Lab where we heard a bit from Oren who is in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group (love the name) in trying to understand how kids can learn abstract thinking or mathematical thinking from a set of simple blocks, lights, and other effects. It is some very cool stuff, the whole place is a giant "what if" studio of technology, learnig, human behavior.

Beyond seeing a few cutting edge things, the real outcome here was meeting some people in person, and more so, getting a sense of how innovation and experimentation play out here. On one hand, there are your standard square classrooms, auditorium lecture halls, and blacKboards covered in chalk with Calculus, but many other places that have the chaotic studio / lab type environment that seems to faciliate exploration. And the shear brain power radiating across the campus is dizzying.

We also set up some agreements for some cooperation on the iCampus project which offers us access to some interesting interactive web contral-able experiments and simulation applications developed at MIT.

And to top it off, we had a fantastic seafood dinner in North End (The Daily Catch) and were surrounded by a buzz of thick, loud, Bostonian accents.

But the really scary part was when Phil asked me to provide a presentation for the "CrossTalk Seminar on Educational Change" today.... me, some hick from Arizona. As mentioned in the Ed Tech Times (hey, MIT is using blogs for publishing, cool) I attempted to roll a bunch of projects into one show: Jackalopes, Ocotillos, Learning eXchanges, RSS, and Other Arizona Learning Technology Curiosities, all rolled up into a new CDB wiki site I will use for occasional presenting. I attempted to toss in Rip.Mix.Feed. among this as well.

I thought I was babbling incoherently for 90 minutes, but did not have to duck any rotten tomatoes, and got some good questions about the RipMix Stuff as well as one the features and capabilities of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (they got a quick sneak peak at the new CSS designs for the openMLX).

Whew, I glad to have this one notched in the belt too. I have one more day of visits before jetting home Saturday.

Oh yes, I've got a batch of flickr-ized stuff from New York and Boston.

The article will be on the wave in the past few months on internet digital audio, meaning the new tools like Skype (and other audio chat), audio discussion boards, the rise of the iPodPeaple, and podcasting. As an adjunct for the web version where I like to pack more stuff that fits or can even be included in print, I am hoping to have a collection of brief "SKyperviews" or Skype interviews.

If anyone is interested in being on the recorded end for this, there are just 4 questions:

(1) Introduction, who you are, what you do, and where (geographically) you are.

(2) Do you own any kind of portable digital audio device? If so, what kind(s)?

(3) What digital audio content do you listen to or how do you use digital audio communication tools? What places are you doing this?

(4) Thinking beyond your personal use, in what ways can you conjecture how digital audio used over the net can be used for learning?

Okay, its nothing ground breaking, but I thought it would be interesting to post a variety of replies. Please contact me if you are interested. The hitch is that between my current travel and time to make sure I can figure out how to reliably record this I have a pretty narrow window of time to schedule this -- It must be either March 14 or 15. Or if you happen to meet up with me in Boston, I may stick my iRiver recorder in your face.

Regardless, if it works out, previews will be blogged here.

Since 1987, Ocotillo has been a faculty led initiative to promote the effective use of instructional technology. Like its desert plant metaphor, Ocotillo has evolved again into four new action groups, leading a range of face to face and online activities in the areas of Learning Objects, ePortfolios, Hybrid Courses, qnd Emerging Technologies. Learn what the groups have done and see how they have used a "small technologies loosely joined" approach of weblog, wiki, discussion board, RSS, and streaming video technology to support their projects

We had the coveted slot of 4:15 - 5:15 PM, last of the day, on a day when the temperatures climbed 20 degrees, the sun was glorious, and broadway shows apparently beckoned. Still, we had a good 20-25 person turnout, and in our tiny room, it looked pack. There was a bit of Ocotillo's past, and by sheer good luck, the creator of this organization, our former Vice Chancellor Dr. Alfredo de los Santos was present. He's an amazing leader, and a highlight for me was a mentorship with him a few yards back.

The bulk of this was an overview of the activities of our Action Groups, and we had two in the room to do their own spots (Thanks Lisa and Shelley!). And a real quick dash through the "small pieces" technology approach. As a point of note I only got half a hand raise when I asked who in the room had experience with wikis.

It was fun, we laughed, we cried, we found learning objects (just kidding about the last one). Nice to have it in the rear view mirror.

This was another wiki-fied presentation, a format that works well for the fluid ideas I weave at the last minute. Lacking net access in the presentation room (Grrr), I faked it good enough by running the wiki off of my G4 laptop in local server mode.

For education to happen, students must be interested and engaged in the subject material. Computer hacking interests students and motvates them to read, do research, talk in class, and present their findings on hackers. Since both white-hat and blach-hat hackers exist, students also learn to develop their own value systems as the class explores the topics of hackers, what they do, illegal versus immoral behaviors, and appropriate versus inappropriate use of technology.

More or less, this is an excellent approach for a freshman new student experience course, where they learn some literacy, research, and writing skills. What was also good about this session was that it was only half lecture format, as the second half, participants engaged in a scnerio activity that had as look at different viewpoints on the issue of hacking.

Some notes follow...